Motion diagram. This sign is outside the licensed video corpus, so the diagram is its full record here.
HELP
“help”
Rest a fist (thumb up) on your flat open palm and lift both hands together.
HELP is a directional (agreement) verb. Its movement between points in space marks subject and object — moving it from you-space to me-space changes who helps whom, with no separate pronoun signed.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
The flat hand lifts and supports the fist — one person raising another up. Documented in the LSF lineage. The direction the sign moves can carry grammar: pushed toward you it means 'I help you'; drawn back, 'you help me'.
- Shaw & Delaporte 2011Shaw, Emily, and Yves Delaporte. A Historical and Etymological Dictionary of American Sign Language. Gallaudet University Press, 2015 (research 2011). link
The sign, taken apart
Every ASL sign is built from a handshape, a place it's made, and a movement. Learn to see these three and you can read and store any sign.
Made at the weak palm.
The dominant hand acts on a still base hand.
Palm facing up.